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Email marketing

Open Rate

Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that were opened by recipients, calculated as opens divided by successful deliveries.

Open rate is the headline engagement metric for email marketing. It is calculated as (unique opens ÷ successful deliveries) × 100, where a successful delivery is any email that did not hard-bounce.

Open rate has become less trustworthy since Apple Mail Privacy Protection rolled out in 2021. Apple pre-fetches images for opted-in users, which inflates Apple-Mail opens regardless of whether the user actually read the email. Many platforms now report 'machine opens' separately from 'human opens', or de-emphasise open rate in favour of click-through rate and conversions.

Healthy benchmarks vary by industry — most senders see 15–30% with smaller, engaged lists trending higher. A sudden drop usually points to deliverability rather than content: check spam-folder placement, sender reputation, and authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) before rewriting subject lines.

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Related terms

  • Click-Through Rate (CTR)

    Click-through rate is the percentage of delivered emails that received at least one click on any link inside the email body.

  • Deliverability

    Deliverability is the rate at which sent emails reach the recipient's inbox rather than the spam folder, bouncing, or being silently dropped by the receiving server.

  • Sender Reputation

    Sender reputation is the score that inbox providers assign to a sending domain and IP, used to decide whether new mail from that source goes to the inbox, the spam folder, or is rejected outright.

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